


together

by kittenscully



Series: fictober 2020 [31]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Getting Back Together, Post-Episode: s11e07 Rm9sbG93ZXJz, Season/Series 11, The Unremarkable House (X-Files), The X-Files Revival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:42:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27315703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittenscully/pseuds/kittenscully
Summary: No room in the house was allowed to be absent of either of them. That was another decision they’d made, he and Scully.[fictober day 31]
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Series: fictober 2020 [31]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1949467
Comments: 8
Kudos: 73





	together

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: "You did this?"
> 
> Direct follow up to invitation (fictober day 16).

“Is that all of it?” 

Mulder glances up from the box he’s set down on the porch, finding her nervous in the doorway. To the casual observer, she might seem perfectly calm, but he knows better. 

Unsurprisingly, she’s been jittery all day.

Coming back home was never going to be without its emotional complications, or without guilt on both of their parts. She’d waited awhile to return, but ultimately, he’d been the reason she left in the first place. All he can do now is try to make it as easy as possible for her to return.

“Think so, yeah,” he says. “The van’s empty, at least.”

“It doesn’t seem like much,” Scully observes. 

He wants to say that she hadn’t taken much, when she left. That she hasn’t purchased much since. That she’d left herself all over the house, in rugs and forgotten dishware, in spare clothing and keepsakes they’d retrieved from the storage locker near D.C. as soon as it was safe to drive there. 

“Well, we learned to travel light,” he points out, instead. 

It isn’t a lie. They had learned to travel light, during the three and a half years they spent running. 

Of course, in their years at the house, they’d unlearned that practice thoroughly, returning to their hoarding tendencies. But, regardless, her condo had been relatively sparse, as if she’d planned to pack up and leave any moment. 

And, he supposes, she had. 

“I’m going to go back,” Scully says. Her fingers are tapping at her jeans. “One last sweep, to make sure I didn’t forget anything.”

“Want company?”

The question is rhetorical. She shakes her head. 

“Then I’ll get all this stuff moved into the house,” he says. 

“Okay.”

As she passes, Mulder reaches out to catch her hand, and reels her in with a gentle tug. She’s too jumpy for much intimacy, so he palms the back of her head gently, and presses his lips to her brow. 

There’s nothing he can say to assuage her worries. He will have to soothe them away by showing her there’s nothing to be scared of. 

“I’ll see you soon,” he confirms.

Nodding, she squeezes his hand, giving him a small smile, and then lets go and heads for the car. 

It doesn’t take long to get her things inside. Breeze carrying the scent of freshly cut grass in through the screen door, Mulder surveys the relatively small collection of boxes and cases.

She won’t be back for at least an hour, probably more, considering the trip there and back. 

He decides to do a quick inventory, finding books and kitchenware in many of the crates, and the suitcases full of clothing, much of it new. Undoubtedly, Scully will want to deal with the clothes herself.

But as for the rest of it, he remembers where all of it had once lived like it was yesterday. And, as he thumbs across the spines of her anatomy books, he resolves to move her in, as much as he can. 

She’d told him, once, that ghosts didn’t exist. Later, she’d amended that statement from a hospital bed, hand folded over the bullet hole in her stomach. _They’re not what you think they are, Mulder. They’re just memories that we don’t want to let go of_. 

Now, he thinks she might be right. But he isn’t so sure that’s a bad thing.

First, he opens every blind and curtain. Light, to trigger productivity.

Then, he turns on the TV, a low level hum on a nature channel. White noise, to keep him from getting distracted.

Finally, he heaves a box of books over to the shelf in the dining room area, and starts to restore it to how it’d been before. 

They’d decided knowledge ought to be spread around the house, he and Scully. Collected bookshelves at retailers, and scattered them, organized them through a system of associations that nobody else would be able to completely figure out. 

The idea that no one would ever be able to reorganize it but them had given him a little burst of satisfaction, and he suspects that she’d felt the same way.

Cookbooks, the few that they had, were always in the dining room, of course. He adds the two that she’d collected, spines uncracked and shiny as new. In there, too, were the dictionaries. Scrabble had been the reasoning there. Encyclopedias, now out of use. An assortment of novels that were frequently read and reread with meals. 

The living room bookshelves were dedicated to science, first and foremost. No fiction, other than Scully’s newly restored Sherlock Holmes collection – and, of course, the Hitchhiker’s Guide. She preferred to be productive there, at the desk in the corner or on the couch.

Mulder can’t count how many times he’d found her asleep in the center, sunken comfortably into the cushions and surrounded with pillows, laptop open across her thighs. 

Digging through the crate, he finds a familiar book heavy enough to crush a finger. _A History of Medical Instruments_ , with illustrations. 

Grinning fondly, he leafs through it. She’d given it to him as a Christmas gift, four or five years ago now, knowing him to be both squeamish and impressed by her bottomless knowledge of everything medical. 

Intended to be half ironic and half flirtatious, he thinks. Effective on both counts.

It had been for her, really, and she’d been the only one to crack it open with any frequency. But back then, everything was for the both of them. 

Mulder sets it on the coffee table, where it belongs. 

Upstairs, there’s the bookshelves in his study, full of texts on paranormal and extraterrestrial phenomena. Alongside them, though, he fits her hard copies of medical journals, a few romance novels she would pass off as his if asked. 

No room in the house was allowed to be absent of either of them. That was another decision they’d made, he and Scully.

Of course, she’s been absent from most of the rooms for awhile. But he’s long past resentment, and he’s long since forgiven her. 

He’d told her once that theirs was the most important relationship in his life. And she hadn’t said it back, but then again, she hadn’t needed to. He’d known how much she loved him then, and he knows how much she loves him now.

If his eyes water a little as he fills in all the gaps she’d left, he’s sure she’ll forgive him that in return. 

The bedroom shelf is home to all of their favorite books. They’d set it up that way not because they read there frequently, but because the room would be the least traveled by guests, and both of them guard the things they treasure most closely.

Of course, there hadn’t been any guests. In all their years here, the only visitors have been Maggie, once or twice, and John and Walter every now and again since their reemergence. 

Nonetheless, the bedroom shelf is home to all of their favorite books. And that’s why it’s been half empty for three years, just like the bed itself.

But not anymore. 

He straightens the comforter, while he’s at it, and swipes a tissue across the dusty surface of her bureau. There should be photos here, he thinks, and the tarot deck that was once her sister’s, tucked behind a Scully family portrait. 

Postcards, too, all the ones she’d written on the run but never sent. To her mother, to John, to Monica. To Missy.

Taking a moment to recall the exact arrangement, Mulder jogs back down the stairs to locate them among her things.

In the bottom small, carefully packed box that contains the photographs, he finds the old metal milagro. A gift from Monica that she’d refused to leave behind, even when they abandoned every other personal effect and ran. 

“It’s for protection,” was all she had said, when asked. 

He places it carefully in its spot on the wall.

After the bedroom, he opens the box of dishware. Plates, mugs, and bowls, collected from various thrift and vintage stores, collection almost identical to the one she’d left with. 

The mug shelf had been her domain, and it’s been empty since her departure. 

He fills it carefully, sliding their favorites into place last – a Red Sox one for him, purchased in 2000, and a cream colored one with orange flowers for her, purchased at some undetermined time years earlier. 

He’ll make them tea, in their mugs, once Scully comes home for the final time.

The glaring gap on the living room wall is filled, once again, with the old-fashioned nautical chart that she’d inherited from her father.

She’d stood on their brand new table to place it there, him spotting her from below as she hammered nails carefully into the wall. He’d stared up at her in her paint-flecked t-shirt and messy ponytail, absolutely smitten and waiting for a chance to scoop her up and carry her away. 

“Shouldn’t that be in the bedroom?” He’d asked. “Somewhere more private?”

“No,” she’d said. “This is the landlocked room, at the heart of the house. We need something to remind us how much there is out there to explore.”

“Pioneer spirit,” he’d remarked, and been rewarded with an eye roll. 

Now, Mulder finds himself staring up at it for a long moment, lost in thought. Already, the house feels more like their home. 

In the last cardboard box, he finally finds the framed art prints she’d collected but never hung in her condo. 

Bracing on his toes as he crouches, he hurriedly pulls them out of their plastic bag. He’s been planning on where to put these ever since spotting them a few days ago, hammering a few hooks into bare spots on the walls whenever he got a chance. 

A Mary Cassatt is the first in the stack, two little girls against a green background. It will go in the bedroom.

No memories of Missy or Samantha belong anywhere else. They’d decided that together, he and Scully, silently and without comment. When they weren’t home, their sisters could keep each other company.

Then, a vintage anatomical sketch of a heart, colored in reds and blues. The living room. A touch of clinical morbidity, to remind any visitors just whose house this was. 

Next, a print of the September 1929 _Weird Tales_ cover, featuring a fainting flapper and a massive simian creature halfway between a sasquatch and a gorilla. The study, for more reasons than one. He chuckles.

The fourth, a still life. Van Gogh, it appears, featuring a plate of onions. The art isn’t Scully’s preferred style, but it is his, and he knows, with absolute certainty, that she’d bought it thinking of him. 

It’ll go in the kitchen, where he’d once taught her how to properly saute onions after years of wondering why she left them out of so many dishes. 

Lastly, at the bottom of the stack, a photographic print of a windmill. 

Standing, Mulder stares at it for a long moment. He knows where it should go. 

The guest bedroom. 

Which, of course, isn’t really a guest bedroom at all, but more an empty bedroom. A waiting bedroom. Closed all the time but kept spotless, just in case the waiting ever stops. Over the years, he’s thought occasionally that sequestering the space has only maintained the hurt. 

But now, things are different. Jackson, not William, is real and out there somewhere. 

He won’t tuck it away. Scully wouldn’t want that, not anymore. He’ll hammer in a hook, and hang it on the wall. Just in case. 

When he returns to the living room after hanging all the prints, the sun is just starting to set outside. Distantly, he hears the noise of a car, and steps onto the porch, letting the screen door swing shut behind him. 

Stepping out of his car, Scully is somber, hesitating. The jacket draped over her shoulders is his, and it dwarfs her. 

“Hey,” he says, holding out a hand as she scales the porch steps. “Was there anything there?”

“No.” Her palm presses to his, fingers interlacing. “We got it all.”

“Ready to come home?”

Long overdue, some might say, but he doesn’t think so. It’s taken exactly as long as it needed to. 

Scully nods, almost reluctantly, and he guides her inside. 

There’s a moment where she stares at the empty, folded up boxes with confusion. Then, there’s a moment where she glances up at him. 

Once, many years ago, she’d told him that he took care of his space – that his apartment felt like a home. She’d been the only one to understand how much he valued it, having a place where he belonged, all his own. How deeply personal it was. She’d been the same way, pieces of herself in every item in her own apartment.

Later, she’d kept his home safe for him, when he was gone. 

Really, he’s only returning the favor.

Silently, he points at the nautical map, stretched out on the wall. 

“Oh,” she says. And then, “ _Oh._ ”

As he watches, Scully notices the anatomical print, the filled bookshelves. There’s a small smile that starts to form at the corners of her eyes, the crinkles there deepening.

“Mulder…” She blinks, her free hand lifting to cover her mouth. “You did this?”

He smiles, bumps his arm into her shoulder.

“I don’t see anyone else around, Scully.” 

“Just here, or…”

“The whole house,” he says. “Y’know, I’d thought something was missing from the study, but I didn’t realize that it was a portrait of us in our true forms circa 1929 until I unpacked that box.”

That surprises a laugh out of her, and then another, and another, until she’s leaning against him and giggling like a girl. 

Letting go of her hand, Mulder wraps an arm around her, pulling her silky head into his chest. His heart feels overly excitable, just as it always does around her, and she reaches up to rub his sternum, as if attempting futilely to soothe it. 

“We don’t have to keep the new prints where I put them,” he murmurs, kissing the top of her head. “We can decide where they go, you and I. Together.” 

She sighs, softly, and then she’s leaning back, her hand coming up to cup his jaw. She doesn’t look scared anymore. 

“I love you,” he tells her, his throat a little tight.

In response, she tugs him down to press their lips together sweetly. To the casual observer, it might seem restrained or distracted. But Mulder feels the curve of her smile, and the gentle brush of her thumb across his cheek. Her chest, swelling against his ribcage. 

And he knows better. 

**Author's Note:**

> My last fictober piece is finally complete! Thank you to everyone who's read all or any of these, and especially to everyone who's left comments or tags about them. It's been a huge endeavor for me.
> 
> The masterpost of all the fics is posted on my tumblr @kittenscully, and is accessible in the fictober 2020 series on here as well.


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